Roxanne Jackson

In the months since Donald Trump’s election, I’ve often wondered about the possibility of art to enact tangible change. Looking forward to four years of terrifying and potentially life-threatening rollbacks on progressive achievements, how can artists do more than just address these issues aesthetically?

Nasty Women at the Knockdown Center provides a practical answer by effectively combining art with tactics of grassroots organizing. As much a benefit as an art show, all the proceeds from the artwork sold will be donated to Planned Parenthood. And with the first step to repealing Obamacare passing in the Senate the night before the opening, the exhibition could not come at a better time.

Brandi Twilley, “Gold and Blonde,” 2011, Oil on canvas. Twilley is born in Oklahoma City, OK, lives and works in NYC. From the Nasty Women show.

Singer and artist David Byrne and technology investor Mala Gaonkar have launched Neurosociety at Pace Art + Technology gallery in Silicon Valley’s Menlo Park. The show is described as an 60-minute immersive theater performance where visitors will be guided through a series of experiences created in collaboration with working neuroscience labs. Viewers are supposed to experience a “surprising aspect of yourself and how you relate to the world and to other people.” Two things: 1. Investors are now artists? 2. This whole description sounds like a recipe for cheeseball art, but I guess we’ll find out. [Eventbrite]

Roberta Smith must really love painter Elizabeth Murray—she describes a vitrine of 14 sketches at CANADA “exciting”, a word I’d never think to apply to a vitrine. But you know what? I’ve never liked Murray’s paintings, and the drawings, as Smith rightly points out, are a significant part of her practice. Smith calls for a museum to put on a show of these works. [The New York Times]

Roxanne Jackson’s facebook call to female artists and curators to organize a NASTY WOMEN show in response to the November 9th election went viral and now she has approximately 1000 pieces. She and a team comprised of Jessamyn Fiore, Angel Bellaran, Barbara Smith, Haley Shaw, Young Sun Han, Clive Murphy, Carolina Wheat, Liz Nielsen, Stephanie Stockbridge, and Aimee Odum will launch the show Nasty Women Art Show at the Knockdown Center on January 12. The organizers are names we feature frequently here on the blog, so we expect the show will be expertly organized and hung. That being said, it’s an open submission show, so don’t expect to see the Chelsea standards here. There’ll be a lot more paintings like the one you see above. [The Huffington Post]

Mayor de Blasio is proposing a new 100 percent affordable housing building and library in Inwood that would have the city partner with the New York Public Library. An ill-conceived rezoning proposal that would allow developers to build a 17 story building that would include affordable housing units in another wise low-rise neighborhood was rejected by the city council last fall. [Curbed]

A futuristic looking BMW self-driving car is said to be able to receive deliveries from drones. This car looks like something from a sci-fi movie set. I don’t trust that it can do anything. [Dezeen]

This week’s expectedly slow post-ABMB madness, so let’s take a moment to recognize the hard work of art handlers, who had to pack up and deliver all those art fair works. Appropriately enough, the Art Handlers Alliance of New York is hosting a happy hour tonight at Brooklyn’s Interference Archive to talk shop and fair wages. Tomorrow, pick between a big screening of a Hollywood blockbuster (Ridley Scott’s The Martian at MoMA), or a panel discussion parsing Robert Frank’s The Americans (Further Down the Line at Lisa Cooley). Thursday and Friday mark digital art openings at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery (the Christiane Paul-curated surveillance-minded group show, Little Sister) and Postmasters (Kristin Lucas and Joe McKay’s user designer mishaps Away From Keyboard). Post-Postmasters opening, get your fill on turtlenecks with the launch of Catharine Maloney’s Teleplay, Part I photographic series at Printer Matter.

And, since this is December, the weekend promises holiday markets: Saturday’s Tropic-Aire at Regina Rex sounds like, in the words of Michael a “love child from a one-night-stand between a suburban holiday craft fair and NADA”, and Sunday’s Holiday Intercourse at Pioneer Works gives you a good reason to head out to Red Hook. Don’t go into winter hibernation just yet.

We’re still flying by on September’s openings, but by the time the weekend rolls around, we’re gonna see some signs of new art life. Throughout the week, there’s a heckuva bunch of artist talks and lectures. We just might jump out of our panda costumes to attend a few. By the time the weekend rolls around though, we’ll have some hard choices to make. Pandacam re-enactments or Mike Kelley’s behemoth retrospective at PS1, Rollin Leonard’s solo show of cut up digital bodies, or Robert Longo’s Patsy Cline cover band reuniting at The Kitchen. Only time will tell whether the government’s shutdown has greater effects on the art world than anyone could have predicted.